What is Geospatial Governance?

Governance is a concept that means broadly 'how an organisation is run' (or how sub-units of an organisation are run). Governance sets the expectations about the activities of an organisation. Governance sets the strategic direction and should consider 'the big picture' of the overall situation. Governance should broadly outline the processes, roles, standards, and metrics that need to be defined and operationalised. However it is not the role of governance to implement or manage the day-to-day operation of those things, but it is a responsibility of Governance to gain sufficient assurance that the expectations are being met.

Governance is a term that is widely misinterpreted. Governance is not the same thing as management nor leadership nor quality control, although it has relationships with each of those things.

There is a common misunderstanding within the geospatial profession where GIS Managers believe that they are solely responsible for geospatial governance (in very small organisations this may be feasible, but as organisations grow and mature they should adopt a wider governance view).

There are also many instances of senior GIS professionals saying that they are performing ‘governance’ over projects when a more appropriate term would be ‘project assurance’ or ‘quality assurance’. While GIS Managers and senior professionals certainly should have a role in geospatial governance, care needs to be taken because if they are the only personnel that assume to control geospatial governance then that can cause many issues.

These misunderstandings can lead to issues such as an overly narrowly focussed view of what the organisation actually needs, or sub-optimal prioritisation: where the preferences of the geospatial team are prioritised ahead of the true priorities of the wider organisation. That said, it is probably more common that the pendulum swings too far in the other direction: where personnel in business units do not gain sufficient understanding of how to use geospatial technology in an optimal way, leading to poor decisions through not consulting with geospatial experts.

Another common issue in organisations where geospatial governance is left to the GIS team is that this can cause a deficit of knowledge, interest, buy-in or enthusiasm for geospatial technology from other parts of the organisation.

A further key concern is situations where the responsibilities for certain activities related to geospatial technology are unclear: there are dangers that two people or two teams will either both decide that they are responsible for something (potentially causing duplication of effort, or confusion, or miscommunication, or conflict) or where all teams will assume that they do not have a certain responsibility so something important might ‘fall through the cracks’.

Other common issues include a common situation where geospatial governance is bundled under IT governance, without governing committees having appropriate geospatial representation. GIS and geospatial technology often fall under IT management in many organisations and GIS can be considered a ‘branch’ of IT, however there are many aspects of geospatial technology that are highly specialised, and many IT professionals and IT managers have insufficient understanding of this specialism. If IT professionals make assumptions about things that they do not truly understand in sufficient detail then that can be a serious risk and cause numerous issues.

The solution to the problems mentioned above is to enable a governance framework that balances three areas: ?geospatial, IT, and ‘the business’ (where ‘the business’ in this context means operational teams that execute the core functions of the organisation, but are not the GIS nor IT teams).

These groups within an organisation have different responsibilities and objectives, and these influence the activities that they engage in and the approaches that they take. Ideally these areas should be working in harmony with common aspirations and common understanding, however there can be subtle or significant differences between these groups and this can cause significant issues. Some examples of this type of situation might be:

• Business teams might want to rapidly add external contractors to have access to systems so that business tasks can get executed promptly: but IT and Geospatial Teams might have security concerns. The business might not agree with the risk tolerance of the technical teams and may see them as a ‘bottleneck’ or ‘blocker’. How can this situation be resolved?
• The geospatial team might seek budget to upgrade their systems however the business might want to purchase a new fleet of vehicles: who should decide which opportunity should get prioritised funding?
• The geospatial team might want to investigate the use of cutting-edge technology and believe that it can provide significant benefits to the business in the medium term: but the business might want the geospatial team to focus solely on short-term tasks that they have an immediate need for: how should these prioritisation decisions be made?
• There might be an option to adopt a national standard or an international standard that is different: which standard should the organisation adopt?
• The business might have a large list of projects that they want geospatial assistance with, but the geospatial team may say that they are under-resourced: how can resource levels be measured and decisions made about this situation?

Good governance provides the frameworks to address these types of issues (and more). I have been working with colleagues on techniques and tools to assist with geospatial governance and implementing these with our clients. This is an interesting topic and one that is gaining a lot of interest from the geospatial industry.

If you found this article to be interesting then you may also like this article about governance frameworks from Matt Lewin at Esri Canada: